Consumer electronic devices, such as cell phones, tablets and other portable devices have become ubiquitous in recent years, with many consumers carrying multiple small electronic devices with them simultaneously. Portability is indeed an important feature for many consumers, as evidenced by the modern trend towards increasingly smaller, thinner, and lighter electronic devices. However, portability typically comes at a high cost in the sense that the smaller size of these devices reduces the amount of screen space and dedicated buttons available as an interface for user input.
This lack of input options is a notable limitation. For example, high-end cell phones are currently available which have more processing power than entire desktop computer systems sold only a few years ago. However, this additional processing power is limited to an extent by the lack of meaningful interface peripherals. While a user may theoretically be capable of pairing a keyboard or other hardware-based input device with their cell phone, such peripherals are often not available. As a result, application developers cannot presume that a wide range of input devices will be available when developing software. The availability of additional interface options would expand the usefulness of these devices by allowing for new applications that take advantage of these additional or non-traditional means of receiving user input.
Hardware manufacturers and software developers have proposed various solutions to the interface problem, though these solutions are often expensive or impractical. For example, there have been multiple attempts over the years to introduce handheld mouse-like peripherals which can provide three-dimensional positioning and motion data, allowing a user to provide input by gestures. Cell phone and tablet peripherals have also been developed, e.g., peripherals that generate a virtual keyboard on a hard surface using lasers or other light sources, such that a user's keystrokes can be detected based upon disruptions of the beam path. In recent years, the cell phone industry has also invested heavily in speech recognition applications as an alternative to the virtual keyboard often used to provide input to a cell phone. Nevertheless, these solutions remain non-ideal because the peripherals noted above are often expensive, non-intuitive, and inaccurate as input devices. Speech recognition applications have become increasingly sophisticated over the last decade, though widespread adoption is limited to a large extent by the requirement of an active internet connection and data use associated with these applications (i.e., mobile phones typically transmit recorded speech to a remote server 111 for processing). Speech recognition is also non-ideal because it by definition requires sound as an input (i.e., it cannot be used as an input interface in situations where silence is necessary). As a result, there exists a need for additional options for input interfaces for consumer electronics devices, particularly non-traditional input devices that are compatible with smaller devices and which can be used across a wide range of scenarios (e.g., while a user is walking or stationary) and without any need for a flat surface as required by many traditional input devices.
The development of additional input interfaces for electronic devices would also be useful for other segments of the population outside of the consumer electronics demographic. For example, many elderly and disabled individuals suffer from partial paralysis and other conditions that create motor impairment, limiting their ability to use traditional interface devices such as a mouse and keyboard. For example, individuals suffering Parkinson's disease may lack sufficient coordination to efficiently utilize a keyboard. As a result, there exists an additional specific need in the art for additional interface options that would allow a paralyzed or otherwise motor-impaired individual to interact with electronic devices and other computer systems.